Bad Fishy Daddy

I really have been. Working 12 hours a day for three weeks straight with four more weeks to go has left me without much free time. What free time I do have has been taken up playing with and bathing small children, fixing dinner (some nights), and keeping up with a honey do list. Not a whole lot of time to deal with my tank.

Big mistake. I got it in my head that I could let things slip for a while until I got a good night to do it. After all I can't make nitrates in this tank if I wanted to. Even after 12 days without attention my nitrates were still only about 10 ppm. What was the problem then? In a word, detritus. In non fishkeeper lingo that's a combination of fish poo, uneaten food, and gunk. My sand was literally covered in it. This is partly because when I vacuumed my tank out there was literally nothing in it but water, fish, and sand. So I know lots this had been in there a while hiding where I couldn't vacuum, but a good bit was because I hadn't cleaned in almost two weeks. I learned my lesson, the tank gets a cleaning every Saturday come hell or high water.

Why was everything out? I'm sick of the algae. I know I know, it's part of a new tank but it's freaking ugly. It's not even a mild brown, its sickly blackish nasty brown. So I started Friday night by removing "half" of the decorations and plants from my tank. I say half in quotes because it turned out to be no where close to half. Anyways, in the sink I mixed up about a 7 to 10% solution of bleach to water. I took the plants and such and got ready to scrub. I took a plant, swirled it in the water and pulled it out to wipe down and... it was clean. I kid you not, ten seconds of swishing in that solution killed the algae and sloughed it right off. Made things go pretty quick actually. I dunked everything in the bleach then rinsed it till the slimy feel and stink of the bleach was gone then I let them air dry. Saturday night I pulled the rest of the decor and waged chemical warfare on the remaining algae. After that I cleaned and redecorated, sort of. I only put the stuff in I washed off on Friday night. Sunday night I put the stuff back in I washed Saturday night.

So the tank got cleaned and redecorated. I moved the hygrophalia around to provide more of a divider in the tank. I'm looking to break up sightlines across the entire tank, from a fish perspective. Some caves got moved. My vine is not on the right wall instead of the right side of the back wall. Gets it away from the filter flow a bit more. I like it over all, I think it'll be good for the serpaes.